


there is a niche in his chest

by rohkeutta



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-12
Updated: 2013-03-12
Packaged: 2017-12-05 02:52:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/718022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rohkeutta/pseuds/rohkeutta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>In the small room with glass walls sleeps a man in soft, black clothes; a man with dark hair and tattooed arms. He lies curled up on his side, so still that Stiles first mistakes him for a corpse, and something very small and very warm settles inside his chest when he sees him. It's like the right key has been turned in a lock and a door opened, and the light is suddenly falling in. The man is beautiful, and Stiles knows what he is even before Laura speaks.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>In the world falling under a shadow and the end of everything approaching, Stiles goes and finds the pack.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there is a niche in his chest

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the line _There's a niche in his chest where a heart would fit perfectly_ from Richard Siken's Road Music.
> 
> English is not my first language and this is un-betaed, so please bear with me.

When his father dies, Stiles seeks out the pack.

He is twenty-eight, alone in an empty town with a house he doesn't want to live in and things he doesn't want to own. The sky is getting a little darker every day, the bright time a little shorter, and in the hospital there are only him and Melissa McCall watching his father wither away.  
“You should go, Stiles,” she says, the wrinkles around her mouth looking deeper than he remembers. She looks like she is now ready to lie down next to John and let go, too.  
So he packs a bag, takes with him a photo of his mother and father, sets the house on fire and leaves to find the Hales. Scott has been dead for three years by the hands of Chris Argent, and Lydia is long gone, too. It’s only him and the long wait for the days to end.

Laura Hale has had a pack in Beacon Hills for fifteen years, their kind the only ones strong enough to last underneath the shadow. She looks at Stiles for a long time when he asks to join, smells the gasoline and hollowness and the creeping, whispering darkness trying to get a solid grip of his edges, and says okay.  
There are some people in the house Stiles recognises from high school; people like Isaac and Boyd and Erica, all of whom he hasn't seen in ten years, hidden in the woods. But the end of the world is coming, and they welcome him in like he belongs. 

Altogether there are nine of them after Stiles comes to the picture.  
“It’s good,” Isaac says on Stiles’ first night in the house, when he is sharing Isaac’s room until they can clear one for him. “There should always be nine of us like it used to be. It’s a strong number for our pack.”  
“What do you mean, like it used to?” Stiles asks. “Have you lost someone?”  
“Yes, in a way,” Isaac hesitates. “I can’t remember his name. I think it’s been over ten years.”

 

After his first full moon Laura takes his hand and walks him through the house, into a small room closed in glass. He has never noticed it before, although he sleeps right next to it, for until now he hasn't been supposed to.  
In the small room with glass walls sleeps a man in soft, black clothes; a man with dark hair and tattooed arms. He lies curled up on his side, so still that Stiles first mistakes him for a corpse, and something very small and very warm settles inside his chest when he sees him. It's like the right key has been turned in a lock and a door opened, and the light is suddenly falling in. The man is beautiful, and Stiles knows what he is even before Laura speaks.  
"This is the Heart of the Pack," she says softly. "He will carry you now, too."

 _The strongest beta of the pack,_ Stiles remembers from a book he read a long time ago. _The Heart of the Pack, the one to sleep, to dream and protect, to carry others in the niche in their chest. Carve the heart out and leave a hole, keep all safe and sound. They will sleep in glass rooms unseen to those who are not supposed to see, stronger than any other bond, their names to be forgotten because they will not awake until the end of the days. They are legends nobody remembers: men and women who give their everything, willingly or not, to store other people in the place where their own hearts once were. The Heart of the Pack, the only one without their own; a price to pay for safety._

 

Life goes on. They go for raids to the town, now completely empty and lifeless; they watch old dvds because there are no more broadcasts, surf around the quieting internet, and read. During the first three months Stiles reads awfully lot, and when he has finished all the books in the house, he and Isaac and one of the triplets drive down to Beacon Hills to break into the library.  
“This makes me sad,” Isaac says as they carry armloads of library property to the car. “Not the books, I mean, but Beacon Hills. I always thought this was a horribly quiet and sleepy suburban town, even with all the werewolf stuff happening, but it wasn’t. Not compared to this.”  
“Yeah,” Stiles says and thinks of his father. He doesn’t know where he is buried. He doesn’t even know if there was anyone to bury him. “Me too.”

 

Sometimes, when Stiles is coming from or going to his room, he stops for a minute or so to watch the Heart of the Pack through the glass. In the months he has lived there, the Heart hasn’t moved at all: he just lies on his side and keeps on dreaming, keeps on keeping them safe and connected, and Stiles sometimes feels inexplicably sad for him. Once or twice he hesitates with his fingers on the sliding door, cracks it open just an inch or two and hovers in the doorway. He wants to touch, just to make sure the Heart is real and breathing, and one day he finally does - he goes in, squats next to the Heart of the Pack and tentatively lays his hand on the black-clad shoulder, slides his palm slowly up and then down again. There is no response, and Stiles is a little disappointed, until it hits him: he has been wishing for an assurance, because he somehow hasn’t accepted the fact that the Heart simply isn’t _a man_ anymore. All this time Stiles has thought of him as a person, who has something inside of him that is his, and his only.

He goes to Laura, who is sitting with Peter in the library room.  
"May I ask something?"  
"Sure," she nods, then smells his anxiety and hesitation, narrows her eyes. "What is it?"  
"The Heart of the Pack," Stiles says and sees her tense visibly. "What was his name?"  
Peter throws a sharp, warning glance at them, easy to decipher. You are not supposed to remember, to cling on the memory of those who once were awake but never will be again. You are not supposed to recall the time when they had hearts in their chests. Laura's mouth trembles.  
"Derek," she says quietly, the name tender like a caress. "His name was Derek."

_Their names to be forgotten because they will not awake until the end of the days._

“How long has he been the Heart?”  
“Eleven years,” Laura replies, something like guilt in her eyes and voice. Peter gets up and leaves the room, like it’s physically painful for him to be there. “Ever since the Alpha Pack came.”  
Stiles remembers the Alphas well. They arrived a couple of years before the shadow started to creep across the globe, like messenger birds of the end. They burnt down one third of the town before Laura and her pack stopped them.  
“He became one so you could defeat them?”  
“Yes.” She looks wistful and fingers a small triskelion pendant on her neck. “He was my brother, once. We sacrificed too much for this ridiculous dying town, when we hollowed him out and put him to sleep.”  
He doesn’t know what to say to that.

 

Stiles starts to sit in the glass room, feeling the room breathe with him. He talks to the Heart of the Pack, tells him about his father and his mother and the long years he has been dying with them in hospitals; tells about the end of everything that is looming over them and asks if they will be protected through it, too. The others look at him like he has lost his mind, all except Isaac, but Laura smiles at him, soft and sad. Stiles thinks that maybe she remembers when she had to carve the heart out of her brother's chest, to keep her pack safe against the threat bigger than the loss.

When the nightmares start, he starts tiptoeing to the center room in the middle of the night, careful not to creak any floorboards, although he is quite sure that anybody else awake hears him anyway. He curls up against the Heart of the Pack, wrapped around the warm, solid back and presses his face into the dark hair. The Heart is smaller than him, or maybe Stiles fits around him because he fits in the hole in his chest, too.  
The Heart of the Pack was once Derek Hale, he realises only now, after so many months of living in the house. Derek Hale, four years older than him, who survived so much sadness and talked to Stiles sometimes when they ran to each other in town. For eleven years Stiles sometimes wondered where he disappeared to, and all this time he has been sleeping here, no longer himself, no longer with a heart.  
Stiles wraps his arms around the waist of what once was Derek Hale, places his right hand over the spot where he is being carried underneath the skin of The Heart of the Pack, and dreams with him.

 

The days get dark. None of them ventures far out to the woods anymore or go to town unless it’s an emergency. The Heart of the Pack sleeps on, and his warmth keeps Stiles and the others from slipping underneath the shadow. Life goes on.

 

The morning the world ends Stiles wakes up, and his chest feels cold and heavy. There is no glass room when he goes downstairs, and in the living room is sitting a tired dark-haired man in his early thirties. Laura sits next to him, holding his hand, her eyes shining with unshed tears.  
The color of his eyes is the palest green Stiles has ever known, the only bright thing in the end.  
"Hullo, Derek," Stiles says, and Derek Hale smiles at him.


End file.
